What's up at the galleries this month?

Fine Arts

by Sura Wood

With the exception of Christmas week, Art never sleeps in
the city. Whether you'd like to take a break from the madness of holiday
shopping or simply escape the onslaught of relatives who have descended on your
house this month, here are a few places to take a breather and imbibe some
culture.

Varnish Fine Art:Isabel
Samaras: Making a Better Yesterday Today Like any self-respecting,
card-carrying Pop surrealist, Bay Area painter Samaras combines the familiar
and the strange in uncanny ways, though many of the dozen or so large-scale oil
paintings in her solo exhibition here are just plain strange. For starters,
take the creature with the naked torso of the overexposed Kate Moss and the
haunches of a faun standing on the edge of a forest; "The Abduction of the
Simian Women," an odd group portrait straight out of a Planet of the
Apes reboot; or the ungainly red blob of a
monster with black-and-white-striped leggings and a dumb-ass expression in "The
Assumption of Pigmon." Samaras, a child of pop culture, extracts
characters from old TV shows and movies, and inserts them into reconfigured
narratives (imagine the crew of Gilligan's Island
in a parallel universe), while taking us on a
mind-bending magical mystery tour of art history from Renaissance art,
the Dutch masters and Middle Eastern miniatures to Victorian ethnography. Women
in her paintings have the airbrushed, uber
voluptuousness of Vargas girls like the nude Barbara
Eden look-alike in her I Dream of Jeannie mode, sitting on a purple bed with the head of a fetching nubile
companion resting on her thigh. Steel yourself. It's a heady brew. Through
Dec. 22.www.varnishfineart.com

Rena Bransten Gallery:Hung Liu: Happy and Gay Drawing on her heritage for paintings
that evoke the mutability of cultural memory, Oakland-based, Chinese-born Hung
Liu's life and art have been profoundly shaped by Chinese history. She spent 36
years in her native country, growing up under the thumb of Mao's Cultural Revolution,
which dispatched her to the countryside and four years of hard labor in the
fields as part of her "reeducation." Diluting her paint with linseed
oil and dripping it onto the canvas, the past seems to dissolve away, lending
her imagery the blurry distortion of distant memory. For her latest show, she
once again returns to her childhood with a cluster of oil paintings that
comment, ironically, on the illustrated primers of her youth. These small
graphic novels were propaganda tools promoting heroism and the joys of manual
labor, glorifying soldiers, families, workers and all of the "happy and
gay" villagers merrily toiling on behalf of the good of the nation. The
show is, in part, a tribute to the countless artists forced to sublimate their
individual vision to the demands of the regime, and harness their creative
energies in the service of the state. Keep your eye out for a retrospective of
Hung's work at OMCA this spring. Through Jan. 12.www.renabranstengallery.com

Robert Tat Gallery:Pictorialism:
The Photograph Becomes Art The Pictorial movement, which peaked in
the early 20th century, declined after 1920 and faded out entirely by WWII,
strove to elevate photography from its lowly status as a mere mechanical
process whose sole function was documenting reality to a fine art form. And the
rest is history. The Pictorialists' most prominent proponent, Alfred Stieglitz,
the leader of the Photo-Secessionists, whose members included Edward Steichen,
devoted himself to the recognition of photography as an expressive artistic
medium on par with sculpture and painting. Inspired by the French
Impressionists and seeking a painterly style, they prized mood, emotion,
interpretation, painstaking composition and the subjective vision of the artist
behind the camera. Pictorialists painted on their negatives, manipulating
images with various darkroom processes, soft focus, filters and Vaseline, which
they smeared on camera lenses. With these techniques many works achieved the
old-world, handmade quality of etchings. Stieglitz, Imogen Cunningham, Annie
Brigman, a bohemian known for her staged pagan tableaux and female nudes in
primal landscapes; San Francisco photographer William E. Dassonville; Hungarian
celebrity portraitist and Olympic fencer Nickolas Muray; and Alvin Langdon
Coburn, whom George Bernard Shaw dubbed "the greatest photographer in the
world" in 1907, are among those featured. Dec. 6-Feb. 23.
www.roberttat.com

SFMOMANew Work:
Alessandro Pessoli Welcome to the human perversity of Pessoli world.
A native of Cervia, Italy, who now makes his home in L.A., the artist meditates
on childhood and mythology, filtering personal experience in a selection of
graphite drawings, works on paper and experimental ceramics. He draws, spray-paints
and sculpts utilizing the Northern Italian Renaissance technique of majolica,
as he references a mash-up of art, theater, film,
Picasso's character studies, the lacerating caricatures of Daumier, the
eccentrics of Fellini's cinematic circus, cartoons and science fiction. A
procession of musicians and their instruments, burning candles, masks of
ominous deities, ghostly crucifixions and solitary, otherworldly figures haunt
Pessoli's hallucinatory scenarios. His first West Coast solo exhibition reveals
a restless imagination and a cast of recurring characters that comprise what
the show's curator calls Pessoli's "personal commedia dell'arte." The
New Work series, whose edgy
gallery vibe is enfolded in the bosom of an established museum, continues to be
one of the best bets in the city for discovering exciting contemporary work. Through
Feb. 10.
www.sfmoma.org